How do people writing biographies recall their lives in such detail. I barely remember my childhood just bits and pieces here and there. But nothing close to writing a book.
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My father-in-law writes his as he goes.
He’s a professional author (dozens of properly-published books in all kinds of genres) and documents his travel, etc. and has done for something like 30 years. He’s on about book 8 I think, starting from when he had a nervous breakdown in his 30’s.
Even then, he often embellishes, transposes, etc. all the stories (which were all true) to be a more coherent narrative, to put them in a better order for telling them, etc. so sometimes the stories he uses are from when he was in entirely another country, or with a different person. That’s how authors write, “based on a true story”.
And they were all true originally. I know, because I feature in about 3 of those books.
He says that, when he had an agent/publisher (they both died in 9/11), they would often reject the absolutely strictly true parts of his life story (calling them “too fantastical”) but lapped up the absolute bullshit parts that he basically over-egged or completely made up to join the narrative together.
Now he is just publishing them himself, makes enough money out of it to keep him in a few cups of coffee a day, and keeps writing the next one all the time. It’ll take about 3-4 years of actual events and hard work to make one book of “stories” (basically both funny and very dramatic things that happened to him) that he would weave into an autobiography.
I imagine people that are already famous do just that… have someone who makes notes of all their anecdotes and then they pull them all together even if that’s done via a ghost writer. And people who later become famous? Well, you have decades of slight mentions of anecdotes and some personal assistant or researcher will jot them down for the agent for when the time comes to write a biography or autobiography.
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